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One of the questions I am asked most frequently from condominium and homeowner Association boards (and managers) is whether the Association is liable for injuries that occur on the common elements? The answer that I always give is that an Association is only liable for an accident on the common areas if they knew of the problem and failed to take reasonable care to make the common area safe. The recent case of Hackett v. Indian King Residents Association reinforced this answer.

In this case, a resident of the Association slipped and fell on some branches on a common area sidewalk. The branches fell only hours before she slipped on them. It was dark when the resident fell, so she could not see the branches that caused the accident. …
Continue Reading Association Not Responsible for Resident’s Slip and Fall Accident on Common Areas

This is a post about reasonable accommodations that does not involve an emotional support animal. I cannot remember the last time I did not write about dogs. Recently, the Pennsylvania Federal Courts ruled that an Association does not need to provide the exact accommodation requested, if the Association offers accommodations that achieve the same function.

In this case, a resident needed a walker to get around. She would use the walker to get from her condominium unit to the lobby of the building. From there, she would leave the walker in the lobby of the building and use her cane to get to her car. The resident insisted that she needed to leave her walker in the lobby of the building.

The Association was not happy leaving the walker in the lobby. It offered a handful of possible solutions. The Association offered to store the walker at the concierge’s desk and retrieve it anytime she asked. They offered to have someone bring the walker to her parking space so she could use it to get out of the car. This building has valet parking, so the Association offered to allow her to use the valet parking (presumably free of charge). The resident rejected all of these solutions. She insisted that she needed to store her walker in the lobby.

The resident sued the Association under the Fair Housing Act, claiming that they did not provide a reasonable accommodation for her disability. The District Court and the Third Circuit Court of Appeals both sided with the Association. In doing so, the Court made two extremely important points that help guide Associations.
Continue Reading Associations are Only Required to Make Reasonable Accommodations, Not All Accommodations

Last week, a new law was passed that allows municipalities to prohibit Video Gaming Terminals (VGT) in truck stops. If a municipality wants to opt out of allowing VGTs, it must pass a Resolution that prohibits VGTs before September 1, 2019. This new law reverses the 2017 gaming law that forced many municipalities to permit VGTs, provided certain conditions were met. This bill was sponsored by two Pennsylvania Senators from Lancaster County, Scott Martin and Ryan Aument.

In 2017, Pennsylvania amended its gaming laws to permit “mini casinos” and VGT arcades. The law gave different rights to counties depending on whether a casino was located in the county. If the county had a casino, the municipalities in that county could prohibit VGTs. If the county did not have a casino already, the municipalities could opt out of mini casinos, but were not allowed to prohibit VGT arcades in “truck stops.” A truck stop was given a very broad definition in this new gaming law. Practically, many convenience stores could be built or converted to meet this definition.
Continue Reading Lancaster County Municipalities May Opt Out of Video Gaming Terminals

Up until April 26, 2019, short-term vacation rentals (like Airbnb, VRBO, HomeAway, etc.) were probably allowed in zoning districts where single family homes are permitted. In April, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decided that a short-term vacation rentals are not permitted as a single family use.

What do municipalities do now?

First, we should review how the Courts got to this point. It is an interesting development. The first case (Marchenko) dealt with a homeowner who rented her home for less than 25% of the year. The second case (Shvekh) had homeowners who rented their home for about half the year. The third case (Slice of Life) has an owner who bought the property solely as an investment, and never lived there at all. The Commonwealth Court said the first was OK, and then the next two cases built on that decision. …
Continue Reading New Ruling Says that Short-Term Vacation Rentals are NOT Permitted in Single Family Zoning

Wrestlemania was this past weekend, and Linda McMahon is rumored to be stepping down as the head of the Small Business Administration.  I have a rule that when those two things happen in the same week, it is time to link back to my favorite blog post: How Your Small Business is Like Professional Wrestling.

My son and I are still watching wrestling.  And there are even more lessons you can learn from wrestling.  Here are more to add to the list:…
Continue Reading Your Small Business is STILL Like Professional Wrestling

I recently presented a national webinar explaining interest rate swaps, caps and floors.  I had the pleasure of presenting with Chrys A. Carey, counsel with Morrison and Foerster in Washington D.C. I have written before on the growing interest in these hedge agreements.  Chrys and I and a number of the “attendees” of the webinar agreed that hedge agreements such as interest rate swaps and forward swaps are becoming more a part of commercial real estate transactions.

Chrys and I brought different perspectives to our presentation.  While I am involved with the borrower or lender, Chrys has much more knowledge with the regulatory side of hedge providers  and traders under the Commodity Exchange Act and the Dodd-Frank Act Regulations.  Despite these different perspectives, our  overlap in experience brought up some interesting discussions.  Some of those are:

  • What happens after LIBOR? Most hedge agreements use LIBOR as the standard for interest rates.  Luckily, most of the variable interest rate loans that are involved in these transactions also use LIBOR as the standard interest rate.  As you may know, LIBOR is set to be discontinued sometime in the next few years.  Chrys believes the hedge providers and exchanges will settle on one single benchmark interest rate (such as the Wall Street Journal Prime Rate).

…
Continue Reading Interest Rate Hedges in Real Estate Finance

Associations and Unit Owners frequently disagree over who is responsible to pay for repairs to certain items.  Sometimes it is easy to figure out.  The Association needs to pay for repairs to the community swimming pool, and the Unit Owner needs to fix the stove.  Whenever the item to be repaired gets close to the boundary of the Unit, however, the answer to this question becomes more difficult.  I came across an interesting case, Winchester Condominium Association v. Auria, where the question was who is responsible to pay for re-wiring a wall outlet: the Unit Owner or the Association?

In this case, the Association required all of the Unit Owners to replace aluminum wiring in the outlets of their Units.  The Unit Owners were informed that the replacement was required for safety reasons and for the Association to maintain property insurance. [Note:  I have done this a few times for dryer vents, pans under hot water heaters and fireplace insulation.]  Every Unit Owner made arrangements to have the wiring in their outlets replaced.  Every Unit Owner, that is, except for one. …
Continue Reading Wiring: Where Does the Common Element End and the Unit Begin?

Soon community associations will have to deal with snow and ice, and the problems that come with it. In this article I want to discuss salt and other deicers.  Many unit owners are certain that one type of salt will ruin their sidewalks.  Other units owners believe that any kind of ice melt will harm concrete.  Associations get complaints about ice in the winter, and then about spalling sidewalks in the spring.  Which deicers are best, and which are asking for problems?  Although most of my posts contain mostly legal advice, for this article I got to use my background as a chemical engineer too.

There are four main kinds of ice melt that are used.  They are sodium chloride (rock salt), calcium chloride, magnesium chloride and calcium magnesium acetate (CMA). The truth is that all ice melt works in basically the same way. Magnesium chloride, calcium chloride and CMA all absorb water.  In doing so, they produce a chemical reaction with the water that produces heat.  The heat produced melts the ice.  The melting ice dissolves the deicer, and then carries it onto the rest of the surface. Sodium chloride is a little different in that it actually lowers the temperature in which water freezes. So instead of freezing at 32 degrees, water with salt dissolved in it doesn’t freeze until it is 25 degrees.  Try it at home – science is fun!
Continue Reading Winter is Coming

… no matter how much they want to. Many planned community and condominium declarations have a confession of judgment paragraph.  These are usually towards the back and written in all caps (just like my father-in-law sending an email).  They seem to permit associations to bypass all of the demand letters and District Justice courtrooms, and just enter a judgment against the Unit Owner.  But what looks good on paper doesn’t always work in practice.  Pennsylvania Courts just re-affirmed the long-time rule that Associations cannot confess judgment against Unit Owners.

Residential condominium or homeowner association assessments are a “consumer credit transaction.”  This means that the assessments are used to pay for goods or services that are primarily for personal family or household use.  Pennsylvania law says that a person cannot enter a confessed judgment against another for a debt that comes from a consumer credit transaction.  In the case that I read, the Association and the Unit Owner entered into a payment plan.  When the Unit Owner stopped making payments, the Association entered a confessed judgment against him. The Court struck the confessed judgment on its own – it did not even wait for the Unit Owner to make a request. …
Continue Reading Associations Cannot Enter A Confessed Judgment Against Unit Owners…